Sustainable soap wrapper among major winners at Pride In Print Awards

A sustainable, heat sealed soap wrapper that is claimed to saving tonnes of PET plastic film, petrochemical wax and glue from landfill each year, has won a major award in the Pride In Print industry awards. Sue Archibald, Pride in Print Awards manager, shares more.

It is one of four retail packaging and display entries that scooped up top awards this year.

Pride In Print is seen as the annual benchmarking event for the printing, packaging, signage and graphic arts industries and attracts hundreds of entries each year, finishing with a black tie event where awards and gold medals are handed out.

Entered by Gravure Packaging, the heat-sealable plastic free soap wrapper which won best in category for innovation and creativity, was developed in response to a request to make the already plastic free packaging into one that was also biodegradable.

Gravure’s Greenseal now has an ecologically friendly layer. It claims that in a year, this new sealing method saves approximately 4000kg of PET plastic film, 2600kg of petrochemical wax and 660kg of glue for the Care Coconut & Lime soap product alone. Managing director, Greg Chapman said they also make sugar stick packaging for distribution to cafes in New Zealand and Australia using the same heat seal, and are currently trialling another food product here.

Pride In Print judges said the soap wrapper was unique to other entries and Fraser Gardyne added that it was amazing how much waste annually the company had saved with the innovation on this one job.

“It’s biodegradable and recyclable so you can chuck it into your compost bin or your paper recycling.”

Gravure Packaging also won two other awards, best gravure process and best in category for flexible packaging for its Whittaker’s Dark Almond 250g block wrapping.

A three shelf 3D display stand for Jagermeister liqueur won a special structural design award, plus taking home the best in category for print finishing and best print finishing process.

Entered by APC Innovate, the stand attracted the judges who said it stood out from other display entrants because of its solid construction, and attractive appeal with printed wooden shelving.

The judges said they appreciated the complexity of it and felt that it was a very clever software design, especially when it was cut and folded without any issue.

APC Innovate’s Greg Nash said retail display boxes were a big growth area in the industry and new digital printing and finishing technology meant designers could push the boundaries of what was done previously.

Ovato NZ won best in category and best web heatset process for a 44-page New World supermarket brochure with internal gate folds that was distributed to 1.3 million Kiwi letterboxes.

The brochure has a double (eight page) gate fold at the back which opened up to 960mm and judges said the unique part of the entry was the size of the run and the fact that gate folds were not often done in web heatset printing, especially at runs of this size.